Ben Skeggs, a lead maintainer of the open-source NVIDIA GPU driver for Linux kernel called Nouveau, has joined NVIDIA. Working as an open-source contributor for the Nouveau driver for more than a decade, Ben Skeggs has achieved the remarkable feat of working to support the NVIDIA GPU hardware on open-source drivers. Before joining NVIDIA, Ben Skeggs worked at Red Hat up until September 18th of 2023. At that date, he posted that he was resigning from Red Hat and stepping back from the Nouveau open-source driver development. However, this news today comes as a bit of an interesting development, as Ben Skeggs is going to NVIDIA, which has been reluctant in the past to support open-source drivers.

Now, he is able to continue working on the driver directly from NVIDIA. He posted a set of 156 patches to the driver, affecting tens of thousands of lines of code. And he signed it all off from the official NVIDIA work address. This signals a potential turn in NVIDIA's approach to open-source software development, where the company might pay more attention to the movement and potentially hire more developers to support these projects. Back in 2012, NVIDIA had a different stance on open-source development, infamously provoking the creator of the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, to issue some snide remarks to the company. Hopefully, better days are ahead for the OSS world of driver development and collaboration with tech giants.

According to ChinaScope, an effort is currently underway to strengthen Huawei's HarmonyOS platform's presence. The local government of Shenzhen has unveiled an ambitious program aimed at supercharging the development of native applications for the operating system. The "Shenzhen Action Plan for Supporting the Development of Native HarmonyOS Open Source Applications in 2024" outlines several key goals to foster a more robust and competitive ecosystem around HarmonyOS. One primary objective is for Shenzhen-based HarmonyOS apps to account for over 10% of China's total by the end of 2024. To facilitate this, the city plans to establish at least two specialized industrial parks dedicated to HarmonyOS software development across various application domains.

Furthermore, the initiative calls for over 1,000 software companies in Shenzhen to obtain HarmonyOS development talent qualifications, underscoring the city's commitment to cultivating a skilled workforce for the platform. Perhaps most impressively, the action plan encourages eligible companies to ramp up their outsourcing services for HarmonyOS app development, with a lofty target of reaching 500,000 HarmonyOS developers. This would represent a significant influx of developer talent focused on the platform if achieved. The Shenzhen government's push aligns with China's broader strategy to reduce reliance on foreign technologies and promote the adoption of domestic alternatives like HarmonyOS. While initially launched by Huawei as a workaround for U.S. sanctions, HarmonyOS has since expanded to power many devices, including smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, and TVs.

The latest version of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack, ROCm, is due for launch soon according to a Phoronix article—chief author, Michael Larabel, has been poring over Team Red's public GitHub repositories over the past couple of days. AMD ROCm version 6.0 was released last December—bringing official support for the AMD Instinct MI300A/MI300X, alongside PyTorch improvements, expanded AI libraries, and many other upgrades and optimizations. The v6.0 milestone placed Team Red in a more competitive position next to NVIDIA's very mature CUDA software layer. A mid-February 2024 update added support for Radeon PRO W7800 and RX 7900 GRE GPUs, as well as ONNX Runtime.

Larabel believes that "ROCm 6.1" is in for an imminent release, given his tracking of increased activity on publicly visible developer platforms: "For MIPOpen 3.1 with ROCm 6.1 there's been many additions including new solvers, an AI-based parameter prediction model for the conv_hip_igemm_group_fwd_xdlops solver, numerous fixes, and other updates. AMD MIGraphX will see an important update with ROCm 6.1. For the next ROCm release, MIGraphX 2.9 brings FP8 support, support for more operators, documentation examples for Whisper / Llama-2 / Stable Diffusion 2.1, new ONNX examples, BLAS auto-tuning for GEMMs, and initial code for MIGraphX running on Microsoft Windows." The change-logs/documentation updates also point to several HIPIFY for ROCm 6.1 improvements—including the addition of CUDA 12.3.2 support.

The story of the MSX platform, as it celebrates its 40th anniversary, is one of the games industries remarkable journeys that has left a powerful imprint on the world of technology and entertainment. Born in June 1983, the MSX, an acronym for "Machines with Software eXchangeability", emerged as a pioneering force that not only connected continents but also people through the magic of computing.

The birth of the MSX was a momentous event, an ambitious undertaking that materialized through the visionary partnership of Microsoft and ASCII Corporation. Their shared vision was clear: to create a standardized computing platform that would foster compatibility and ease of software development across a myriad of hardware manufacturers. What began as an idea soon evolved into a global phenomenon, revolutionizing the way people interacted with computers and forever altering the course of gaming history.

AMD today announced the AMD Versal Premium VP1902 adaptive system-on-chip (SoC), the world's largest adaptive SoC. The VP1902 adaptive SoC is an emulation-class, chiplet-based device designed to streamline the verification of increasingly complex semiconductor designs. Offering 2X the capacity over the prior generation, designers can confidently innovate and validate application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and SoC designs to help bring next generation technologies to market faster.

AI workloads are driving increased complexity in chipmaking, requiring next-generation solutions to develop the chips of tomorrow. FPGA-based emulation and prototyping provides the highest level of performance, allowing faster silicon verification and enabling developers to shift left in the design cycle and begin software development well before silicon tape-out. AMD, through Xilinx, brings over 17 years of leadership and six generations of the industry's highest capacity emulation devices, which have nearly doubled in capacity each generation.

Alphabet Incorporated's Google AI division has today revealed a planned update for its Bard conversational artificial intelligence chatbot. The experimental generative artificial intelligence software application will become capable of assisting people in the writing of computer code - the American multinational technology company hopes that Bard will be of great to help in the area of software development. Paige Bailey, a group product manager at Google Research has introduced the upcoming changes: "Since we launched Bard, our experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI, coding has been one of the top requests we've received from our users. As a product lead in Google Research - and a passionate engineer who still programs every day - I'm excited that today we're updating Bard to include that capability."

The Bard chatbot was made available, on a trial basis, to users in the USA and UK last month. Google's AI team is reported to be under great pressure to advance the Bard chatbot into a suitably powerful state in order to compete with its closest rival - Microsoft Corporation. The Seattle-based giant has invested heavily into Open AI's industry leading ChatGPT application. Google's latest volley against its rivals shows that Bard's has become very sophisticated - so much so that the app is able to chew through a variety of programming languages. Bailey outlines these features in the company's latest blog: "Starting now, Bard can help with programming and software development tasks, including code generation, debugging and code explanation. We're launching these capabilities in more than 20 programming languages including C++, Go, Java, Javascript, Python and Typescript. And you can easily export Python code to Google Colab - no copy and paste required." Critics of AI-driven large language models have posited that the technology could potentially eliminate humans from the job market - it will be interesting to observe the coder community's reaction to Google marketing of Bard as a helpful tool in software development.